For Anmol’s prompt over at dVerse – relationships and sensuality. This is an “extreme” haibun being less that 65 words. Actually, all haibun need to be short as in the original. Haibun are true accountings ended with a seasonal haiku. Also posted on Real Toads Tuesday Platform.

Cherry Blossom Snow
“The heart was made to be broken.” Oscar Wilde

He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, like an ancient Samurai. I fell in love at first sight. I was plain and short yet somehow, he fell in love with me. Long years of intense love and then, he returned to Japan. My heart broke.
cherry blossoms
fell like snow in the spring
caressing my skin goodbye

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Today is day 27 of OMIRWOPAN. Only three more days to go. Today Margaret is our prompter over at Real Toads. She attended an art exhibit of works by children and obtained permission to photograph some of the art for use with this prompt. No names of the kids are given but the ages and grades are listed under the pictures. The ages range from elementary to high school. I picked one called The Bones. This is a haibun with a nonstandard haiku ending it.

10th grade 15 yrs.

At Rest
You died June 18. Every day I watched you dying – slowly and painfully. Every day I prayed for you to die while feeling sadness at losing you forever. You were silent by March. The vampire that sucked out your memories took away your life, your love – all except your knowing of me. Me you never forgot. In July I received your ashes. I sat in the car with the box holding your ashes cradled in my arms and wept. Then in the heat of summer I made the pilgrimage farther south – to the country cemetery where our ancestors lay under the big oaks and magnolia trees.

When we arrived at our hometown I rode you around the streets of your memories – past our old home place, past the high school from which you graduated. past the hospital where you gave birth to me. Then onward until we reached the country. At the cemetery I walked with you and took a trowel and in your mother’s grave I dug. I dug a deep hole in the brick hard red soil. sweat dripping down onto the earth like tears. At last I had the hole deep enough.
I poured your ashes into the hole and placed a red carnation on top – your favorite flower. I replaced the earth and tamped it down. I tucked the earth around your ashes as I used to tuck you in for sleep. I built a small stone cairn over your resting place. Be at peace mama. I love you. And then the long drive alone back up north.
sweltering heat – I
buried your ashes in the red soil –
a lone cardinal sang

Bjorn is hosting the Pub today and prompting us to write poems based upon Expressionism. Whew. I hope this one comes close. Come join us at: Meet the Bar with Expressionism

Cuts like a Knife
The sky is so blue overhead
And the clouds so white.
Yet the wind cuts through you like…
a hot knife through warm butter
scissors through paper
a katana through silk…

And you. You.
You go through me like a
hot knife through cream cheese or…
like a katana through that thin branch
On my cherry tree –
you slash and slice and
and the blossoms fall
to the ground.
the birds peck now among them
finding the worms that burrow
underneath.

a lone crow circles overhead
in that blue winter sky.
he cuts through the sky
like a katana slices through fog.

The Waiting GameYou are gone. You got on that big plane and it took you back to Kyoto. You had lived in the US long enough to teach medicine at Duke, to move to Richmond and become a forensic pathologist, long enough to rescue me from an abusive relationship and for us to fall totally deeply wildly in love with each other. Twenty years in the US and then you moved back to Kyoto. What were you waiting for? Why did it take you so long to return? Was it me? I waited long nights for you to come home after taking apart the dead to find answers, to give names to the nameless, to convict the guilty and vindicate the innocent. You stayed long enough to teach me kendo, to use a katana, to properly cook rice, to learn the sensation of cherry blossoms falling on naked skin. I taught you to properly fry chicken, to savor a fresh summer tomato, the sensation of ice cube held within lips slipping over your skin. I waited for you to return; day after day after month after year after season. You wrote every week and I threw them all away. You waited on my reply. I waited for your return. We waited and waited and…

cherry blossoms on
naked skin – lips on mine –
seasons wait forever

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Open link night at dVerse tonight. You can submit any one poem of your choice. Come join us. Bjorn is tending the pub all the way over in Sweden! He has a special guest today – Sean Michael – a prisoner in the California penal system who frequently posts on dVerse. Open Link Night #178 – Saving Grace
The Necklace
After you left I kept thinking you would return.
And because you so loved the small beauties
and the simple things, I kept the memories.
I wanted to embed them in molten glass
and string them on a fine gold chain
that you could wear under your clothes
close to your heart,
to pull the chain up and look at those simple things
and see them through my eyes that saw them without you:
the way the mist lay close to the ground
in the late autumn,
or the sound of birds the morning of the first snow.
The tiny new kittens boneless and blind
opening their pink mouths and silently hissing.
The last string of geese flying south
in the apricot dawn,
the velvet eyes of the young heifer in my friend’s barn
and the warm smell of the animals and hay,
the first tiny pink cherry blossom opening slowly
in the cold of early spring
or the ever spreading ripples in the koi pond
made by slow rain.
you never returned.
and the necklace of memories sleeps
in a small wooden box
never touched by your hand or seen by your eyes.

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Another entry for dVerse Poet’s Pub where Kim is inspiring us to write of a poetic spouse, preferably of someone dead. I could not resist doing a tanka for Kiku, the first wife of Kobayashi Issa and mother of his first two children who both died tragically young. Their deaths inspired Issa to pen: Tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagari sari nagara:
this dewdrop world –
is a dewdrop world
and yet, and yet…

Kiku
I loved you in the
warmth of our love – I will love
you in the coldness –
our children dissolved like dew
on the edge of summer grass

keiu*
Almost five years to the day,
I met you.
Five years since the love of my life
Returned to Japan – just left in a flurry
Of heat and fire – like the black dragon he was.
Days without love, weeks without love,
Years without love.
And almost five years to the day
You stepped into my life.
Eyes the color of a summer blue sky.
You spoke.
A gentle rain began to fall.
My soul began to bloom again.
Summer heat turned to
Summer rain – sweet and welcome –
Dried soul blossomed green.